what's crazy is that when I posted and refreshed the page I was the only comment. It wasn't until page 3-4 of this review (as I was reading after the comment post) that I noticed yours was there so there is some lag between when a post is made and when others see it (even though you see it right away). I wish we had a time stamp feature on the post! :)Reply

Wow, plenty of good options from AMD and Nvidia. Since the introduction of eyefinity and 3D surround, we dont need to spend a fortune to play the latest games. For most users with 1 monitor a $250 dollar card gives excellent performance.Reply

I was just curious about the 2.8 FPS on Crysis by the Radeon HD 5970 - is that reproducible/consistent?I am just curious, b/c on the first graph of average frame-rate it leads the pack; if it fluctuates that badly I would definitely like a little bit more background on it.

No, it's highly variable. With only 1GB of effective VRAM, the Radeon cards are forced to texture swap - the minimum framerate is chaotic at best and generally marks how long the worst texture swap took. With swapping under the control of AMD's drivers, the resulting minimum framerate ends up being quite variable.Reply

Can somebody explain why 1GB is not enough when 1GB is enough memory to store over 160 frames at 24 bits at 1920x1080. At 60fps, 1GB should be able to supply a constant uncompressed stream of frames for almost 3 whole seconds. Seems like more than enough memory to me. Sounds like somebody is just haphazardly wasting vast amounts of space for no reason at all. Sort of like windows with its WinSXS folder. Lets just waste a bunch of space because we can!Reply

It doesn't work like that. Computer games generally have no more than 3 frames rendered at a time. The remainder is pre-render textures, models, etc ... everything that might be needed to render a frame. They need to have everything handy that might be needed to make a picture of your view-point. Any enemy that might step into view. The mountains behind you in case you turn around, etc. If it isn't already stored on the card, they have to go get it from disk, which is comparatively extremely slow (thousands of times slower than anything that is already in memory).Reply

Yeah, i have to agree here. In the the two games generally considered the most taxing of modern systems (crysis and metro) the 6950 comes out on top (by like 15% at that) - i think it's a mistake to say:

"The GTX 560 Ti ultimately has the edge: it’s a bit faster and it’s quieter than the 6950, and if that’s all you care about then there’s the answer you seek."

I haven't totted it up but even if the 560 over all benches has a few frames over the 6950 (tho tbh, it doesn't even look that way :/) the fact that it loses in games like this means people buying it on that recommendation, thinking it's the faster card, will be disappointed.Reply

I just don't get your conclusion. You say that the 560 is faster than the 6950 1g but looking at the graphs it's a draw. It's faster is some games the AMD is faster in others.

I originally just looked at the games I play and when I did that the 6950 won all of them. It's a good thing I went back and looked at all of them before I posted. I was ready to really give it to ya. But as it is I just think these two cards are about as evenly matched both in performance and price as I've seen from the two camps in a long time.

Running a 8800GTX I'm about due for a gfx card upgrade. With what is out right now the 6970 is about the best bang for my buck.

Ever since Anand stopped doing the vid card reviews (yeah it's been a while) I haven't exactly agreed with the conclusions being given. Everyone's entitled to theirs I guess.Reply

Well, at least they have the distinction of being the only site (that I've seen thus far) to say the 560 is faster than the 6950. It's just laughable, IMHO, that they'd feature several titles known to favor Nvidia (with results showing the 560 beating top-tier AMD cards), yet still reach the conclusion that the 560 is "faster" at stock.

I've been slowly taking AT less and less seriously.........Thank goodness for their benching charts.Reply

One thing I've noticed about the comments so far... every single person disagreeing with the conclusion ends up agreeing conclusion in their reasoning.

i.e. "what games you play"

"The deciding factor seems to come down to just how much to value noise and cooling (560) versus power consumption (6950), what games you play, and whether you’re currently invested in the NVIDIA (CUDA, 3D Vision) or AMD (Eyefinity) ecosystem."Reply

Well, in that case, Anand is contradicting themselves.....Since (using that logic) the 560 wouldn't be "a bit faster" in performance, or have the overall edge. In other words, they wouldn't be able to conclude which card is "faster." They're conclusion of "faster" is based on their own benchmarks.Reply

To be clear, on my master charts the GTX 560 Ti has an average of a 2% performance lead over the 6950 1GB at 1920, and a 10% performance lead at 1680. This doesn't preclude the fact that performance varies wildly by game; it only means that on average the GTX 560 Ti was faster.Reply

That's just a terrible way to reach a performance conclusion, in so many ways. Then again, the number of people taking Anandtech's (GPU) reviews seriously is smaller every day. I miss the years it was practically my homepage and main reference point.Reply

I was puzzled by your comment (and others'). It seemed to me that while the 560 and 6950 1GB were changing relative position in the charts, the 560 really wins hard when it does win, so it would come out slightly above the 6950 on average.

Plus, I'd prefer a card that does well every time (the 560) but gets slightly beaten occasionally, rather than a card that does well most of the time but really falls behind in certain games.Reply

People are always jaded when it comes to games that show a significant bias for a particular manufacturer. In the case of Civ 5, HAWX and Dirt 2 (as of late); these titles favor Nvidia products. If you look at the benches, the 560 is even beating a 6970 in some instances.Reply

Anandtech has always had their nose up Nvidia and intels ass so no surprise there, but what a lousy conclusion to an awfull review. Apparently Anandtechs efforts to find good writers were in vane.Reply

The GTX560 looks interesting. However, prices for 768MB 460s are hitting rock bottom. I just paid $90 for one from TigerDirect (after rebates), and it looks like there are a few under $130 on Newegg. It seems like it would cost about the same to run SLI 460s and 1 560 (assuming your case can handle it), and I can guess that the SLI config would be faster in most games.

I actually kind of expected NVidia to release a dual-chip 460 as their next-gen 580, and take a page out of AMD's playbook (wonder how hot/loud that would be).Reply

The GF 460-768mb are slow compared to their 1Gb versions. They run out of memory way too quick. But for $90... that would be a great deal that is worthwhile. Newegg is showing $150 on avg for the 768mb 460s. Which is about $25 less than a newer 6850 card which is easily faster. Its even faster than the 1GB 460 and cost less.Reply

[quoteAMD’s scramble to launch the Radeon HD 6950 1GB has produced a card with similar levels of performance and pricing as the GTX 560 Ti, making it impossible to just blindly recommend the GTX 560 Ti.[/quote]

What? The 6950 2GB is faster than the 560 and the The 6950 2GB is FASTER than the 6950 2GB at every resolution except the highest ones like 2560x1600.

This is from Tom's:

Of course, mid-week, a 1 GB card showed up, so I ran it through our complete benchmark suite. In just about every case, the smaller frame buffer (and tighter memory timings) yields one or two more frames per second than the 2 GB model. It's not worth rehashing in a page full of charts. Literally, expect one or two more frames per second across the board.

I would just like to say, very nice article... well written and informative. I've been a fan of anandtech for many years and the GPU articles never disappoint.

Is it just me or does anyone else find reading about Nvidia's architecture a lot more interesting?

Also, I really hate that the comments are filled with people that say you are bias towards NVIDIA. To all those people, PLEASE go read the some other reviews. A majority of them praise the 560. This article is more critical of the 560 value than most.Reply

Thanks again Ryan and Anandtech for keeping the 4870 in your charts for 1920X1200 res. I've always read the new gpu reviews and been saddened that although the new cards are fast they were still not approaching 2X the performance of my 4870. With the constant name change with the same parts, or slightly faster parts, it's taken until just about now to have a card worth the upgrade.

Now my question is will I see the performance improvement in GAMES using my C2D 8500 (OC'd to 3.8GHz), or do I need to rebuild the system with Sandy Bridge to actually see the 2X GPU performance? Reply

One of my buddies has a C2D 8500 system OC'd to 3.5 i think. He got himself a 5870 (overclocked) to game. The problem we ran into was that the C2D is too slow to handle games like Civ5 that heavily rely on the CPU to keep up (you can still play the game, but it's literally wasting the 5870 with noticeable lag from the chip). Basically, he is upgrading now to a sandy bridge. I'd wager some of the older i7's or maybe even a Thuban (OC'd to 3.8 with a good HT overclock) could manage, but why bother when a new architecture is out form Intel (or AMD later in the year).So enjoy your new build ;),NimizReply

Over the last couple years Nvidia has really struggled and they may be on the ropes at this point. They have created a lot of their own problems with their arrogance so we'll see how it all plays out.Reply

no, that's only a result of the 5xxx series being stupidly named. Using 5970 for a dual chip part was the error. Use an x2 suffix or smthng. AMD is back on track with the 6xxx naming convention... well, until we see what they do with the 6 series dual chip card.Reply

AMD said they changed because they didn't want to confuse people with the 5750/5770 cards with the 6000 series. Which is completely stupid... so instead they confuse everyone with all th cards.

If the 6800s were called 6700s - they would have been easily faster than any of the 5700s and at least somewhat equal to the 5800s (sometimes slower, others faster). Instead, we have "6850" that is slower than the 5850.

The prices are a bit high still, yet far cheaper than the 5800 series, in which a 5850 was $300+ or $400 for the 5870. But by all means, I'd rather spend $220 on a 6870 than $370 on todays 5870s.

Anyways, I'm still using a 4670 in my main computer. When I do my next upgrade, I'll spend about $200 at the most and want at least 6870 level of performance, which is still about 4x faster than what I have now. Noise & heat are very high on my list, my 4670 was $15 extra for the better noise & heat cooling system. Perhaps in 6 months, the AMD 7000 or GeForce 700 series will be out.Reply

I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases the increase in fin surface area (from having a bunch of straight fins packed more closely together) produces better cooling than having a cleaner airpath.Reply

You should check out the four Asus Direct CU II three slot radiators that came out today on the GTX 580, 570, and the HD 6970 and 6950, each using two 100mm fans, five heatpipes and three slots of pure metal, they claim you can easily fit two of them on ATX for SLI and CB? Reply

I picked up a GTX460 768mb for $150 last summer. I assume the GTX560 will be down to that price point by this coming summer. I am very happy with the GTX460 except in Civ 5 and I think I am CPU limited there (Phenom II x3).

So when this thing hits $150 I will sell my GTX460 on fleabay for $100 and upgrade, I guess. I wish I could buy one and stick it in my 360....Reply

Looks like the video card market is picking up the pace again, which is both a good thing and not. I guess my GTX460 1GB from only 6 months ago now officially sucks and is only usable as a doorstop...a crippled, half-broken, semi-functional video card such as it is.

On the other hand, it's great that technology is moving so fast. It just means that instead of buying a new video card and keeping it for 1.5 - 2 years, you once again have to upgrade every couple of months if you want to stay on top.

Also, regardless of the marketing, anything below a 570 *sucks* for gaming above 1680x1050. Look at the results of Stalker, Metro 2033 and Warhead. You need to drop to 1680x1050 before the 560 Ti manager near 60 FPS which is the minimum for smooth gameplay.Reply

The GTX 460 is still the best card in nVidia's lineup with regards to price for performance. The 560 is just nVidia's standard interim update to keep itself relevent. I see no need for current GTX 460 owners to rush out and buy this card (or anyone who wants to replace a Fermi card for that matter) when the 600 series will be out this summer and will most likely have new arcitecture. Reply

I was kinda surprised by final thoughtsout of 34 pictures of fps in games, 17 won 6950, 12 gtx560 and 5 were in range of 1frame from each other (4 of those are for 6950) so I wonder why the final thoughts gave edge to GTX560.Reply

He may have just done an average of the percentage differences between the two.So if, for instance, the 560 won by 50% in one test and lost by 10% in each of two tests, that method would call the 560 10% faster, even though it was slower in 2/3 of the tests.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the conclusion is accurate (I think 6950 looks more powerful overall from the benchmarks), I'm just saying how I think he might have come to his conclusion.Reply

Yeah, it's kinda lame, given nobody in their right mind would buy a stock 460anymore. Many places don't even sell them now, and a highly oc'd 460 iseasily $50 to $60 less than a 560, so a proper comparison would be useful.Alas, they succumbed to the moaning minnies.

If anyone's interested, I can run the downloadable Stalker COP benchmarkusing this review's settings (my own 460 FTW tests have been using 1920x1080,Extreme detail, SSAO = Default/High, Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting, so notdirectly comparable).

I can't test 2560x1600, but I can test 1680x1050 and 1920x1200, also withFTW SLI.

Ryan, what full settings did you use for the Stalker test? ie. the SSAO (orother) mode, etc.?

I agree.. GTX460 cards are available at speeds up to 850MHz or perhaps even more, a huge difference from the 675MHz that the card supposedly launched at (though even at launch, cards running at anything under 7xx MHz was pretty rare).Reply

Ha! I just bought a stock 460 1GB two weeks ago. Terribly cheap cooler, so the thing only OC's to about 750Mhz before it throttles and I have to reboot. But I only paid $130, so I'm thrilled with the card. I'm on 2560x1600 screen, otherwise the 768MB card would have been the better value.Reply

The GF2ti was really a die-shrink GF2Pro at 50Mhz faster GPU clock, nothing more. In the real world, it was cheaper than the GF2Pro and was a new CHIP process/series they used for the GF3-TI series. Still, the GF2ti was a pretty good deal in its day at about $125 or so... far cheaper than the $300 GT2-Ultra which just lost its crown to the GF3 series.

A little history lesson.

All GF400mx /4000mx series are GF2 technology built on a smaller process, nothing more. Sadily, even now, you can STILL buy NEW GF2mx and GF4000MX cards. The 4000MX is a Frankenstein card. Nvidia took a very slow GF2mx GPU and stuck in DX8...

This card hardly even caught up to my over-a-year-old Radeon 5870. I don't know why this card looks comparatively slow in anandtech's reviews whilst on other tech sites it is about on par with 6950 and thus ever-so-slightly faster then 560Ti.http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_...

so far I find those charts the most informative when it comes to relative performance between cards. It looks like anandtech's blend of games somewhat favor NV hardware. Reply

The Asus 560 looks really amazing, guess it's faster than my brand new Asus 6870 directcu, but that's ok I knew the 560 was coming out, and wanted the Asus 6870 for it's beautiful triple heatpipe and gorgeous backplate heatsink the way it looks thru the window of the Corsair Obsidian 650D. Yup it's not out yet, April but man thru that window with my new Corsair AX850! I'm just buying parts for a window! Oh man the sweetness, that view while I work with Microsoft Word. The 6870 came with dual full sized DisplayPorts fantastic, but the Asus 560 comes with just a mini-HDMI. What is that all about? I didn't even know they came in mini. Maybe AMD will release the 7000 series early this year die shrink and all, 7870 for Christmas ahhh life is good.Reply

Hi can we please have some benchies on this feature please...While surround is not an option for the single nVidia card, 3D is, and it is hard to judge performance with this enabled. Readers need to know if 3D is an viable option with this card at perhaps 16x10 or 19x10

I agree with some of the other comments and find the conclusion rather odd. I didn't really get why all the comparison's were done with the 460 either, yes this is the replacement card for the 460 but isn't really to relevant as far a purchasing decision goes at this moment in time. I found HardOCP's review far more informative, especially as they get down to brass tacs; the price to performance. In both instances the 560 doesn't make too much sense.

I still enjoy reading your reviews of other products, particularly power supplies and CPUs.Reply

The radeon 6950 wins hands down in 1920x and 2560x in almost all important games: crysis , metro , bad company2, mass effect 2 and wolfenstein

The geforce wins only the games who not a lot of people play : civ 5 , battleforge, hawx , dirt 2

Add to that others tests : 6950 wins in the popular call of duty , vantage . In 3dmark 11 the geforce is 15 % weaker(guru3d) so the conclusion as i see it : radeon 6950 1 gb is aprox. 5-10 % better and not the other way .Reply

"By using a center-mounted fan, NVIDIA went with a design that recirculates some air in the case of the computer instead of a blower that fully exhausts all hot air."

I don't think I've ever seen a middle or high end NVIDIA card that fully exhausted all hot air. Maybe it exists, I certainly haven't owned them all, perhaps in the customized AIB vendor pantheon there have been a few.

This is not just a nitpick. When swapping out an 8800GT to an 8800 Ultra a few years back, I thought I was taking a step forwards in case temperatures, because the single-slot GT was internally vented and the Ultra had that second slot vent. I didn't notice the little gap, or the little slots in the reference cooler shroud.

That swap began a comical few months of debugging and massive case ventilation upgrades. Not just the Ultra got hot, everything in that case got hot. Adding a second 120mm input fan and another exhaust, an across-the-PCI-slots 92mm fan finally got things under control (no side panel vent). Dropping it into a real gamer case later was even better. (No, I didn't pay $800 for the Ultra, either).

I'm not a fan of, um, graphics card fans that blow in two directions at once, I call them hard drive cookers, and they can introduce some real challenges in managing case flow. But I no longer run under the assumption that a rear-venting double slot cooler is necessarily better.

I'd like to see some case-cooker and noise testing with the new GTX 560 Ti reference, some AIB variants, and similar wattage rear venting cards. In particular, I'd like to see what temps a hard drive forward of the card endures, above, along, and below.Reply

I know that comparing an on CPU chip graphics with GPU cards like the ones on this list would be like comparing a Prius to a Ferrari but I would like to see the test results just the same. Sandy Bridge on CPU GPUs come in two models (2000 and 3000). It would be interesting to see just how far below the Radeon HD4870 they are and see how the 2000 and 3000 compare. Reply